Co-founded by Prateek Bhargava, an alumnus of the top-ranked Indian School of Business, Hyderabad and Prikshit Dhanda, a law graduate of Delhi University, Mindler is a high-potential online career counseling service of Delhi-based edtech start-up Taxmann Education Pvt. Ltd, promoted by the duo in July 2015. Mindler.com offers career guidance and counseling services to secondary and higher secondary students by integrating artificial intelligence, psychology, psychometrics and algorithms. Newspeg. Since it went live in April last year, Mindler.com has counseled over 120,000 students countrywide. History. In 2002, while still a high school student, Bhargava received judicious career advice from Prikshit Dhanda, then a career coach and mentor with Career Launcher Ltd. Over the next decade, the two kept in touch on email and the phone. In 2015, the idea of promoting an edtech venture “to make career counseling, dominated by a few established counselors and accessible to a handful of students, available to millions of students across the country”, fructified. Subsequently, the duo persuaded the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) of IIM-Ahmedabad to incubate their fledgling start-up. The company received a huge boost when it was awarded angel funding of Rs.1.2 crore at the ‘Power of Ideas 2015’ contest conducted by The Economic Times in association with Reliance Jio, the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India and CIIE. “We roped in well-known applied psychometry expert Prof. N.K. Chada to head a team of 16 full-time experts and several freelancers, which invested 75,000-plus man hours over 15 months to design algorithms for several careers based on inputs from domain experts and international faculty. Mindler.com went live last April and its three-month pilot phase was validated by 10,500 students. Last August we launched our B2C and B2B commercial operations,” says Bhargava, also an alumnus of Delhi University and MDI Gurgaon, who acquired substantial work experience with Maruti Suzuki and Accenture before co-promoting Taxmann Education Pvt. Ltd. Direct talk: “Though career decisions shape a person’s life trajectory, career counseling is a neglected area in India with only a small minority of schools offering professional advice. Our objective at Mindler is to fill this lacuna by offering a reliable online career guidance system accessible to all students,” says Dhanda, chief strategy officer of the company, who has over two decades of career guidance experience with Career Launcher Ltd and Making India Employable Pvt. Ltd. Future plans. Mindler is in the process of raising $1 million, which will be utilised for product development, brand awareness, and human resource development. “We are targeting to sign up 100-150 schools this year in India, and a few in Nepal. Our heavily researched careers database and other material have already been translated into Hindi. We plan to translate it into major regional languages over the next year,” says Bhargava. Wind in your sails! Autar Nehru (Delhi) Goals-driven Edupreneur Sanjay Padode is secretary of the Centre for Developmental Education, a not-for-profit of the DSIJ (Dalal Street Investment Journal) Group which has promoted the Institute of Finance and International Management Business…
